Cnooc once tried to obtain the U.S. oil company Unocal but had to drop the bid when it ran into sharp political opposition in the United States. In the deal it's now announced with Chesapeake, it will spend $1.08 billion to buy one third of the U.S. company's Eagle Ford acreage in Texas and may spend up to another $1.08 billion to cover up to three quarters of Chesapeake's drilling and well completion costs. According to a Financial Times report and analysis, Cnooc is eager to acquire technical experience, with an eye on China's shalegas reserves.

Pat Wood, a former Texas energy regulator who chaired the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during George W. Bush's presidency, has declared that the U.S. gas market is resembling its state in the 1990s, when prices stayed low by historic standards with minor seasonal variation. "Even if half the supply is unavailable for economic or environmental reasons, we could see sub-$6 gas for the rest of the decade," he has said. So promising is the situation, indeed, there's beginning to be serious talk of the United States challenging Russian and Middle Eastern producers in the global LNG export market.

Transmission has always been the elephant in the room when it comes to renewable energy (with apologies to energy storage; let's call that the mildly smaller hippopotamus in the room). Because wind and sun tend to pick and choose their spots to blow strongest, shine brightest and longest, there is usually the need for additional infrastructure capable of bringing all that carbon-free electricity to the load centers.

Offshore wind is no different, and is even more complicated in terms of transmission because it's, you know, off shore. With the offshore wind industry poised to take off -- or at least finally get one foot off the ground -- there is now a proposed project that would theoretically ease the transmission issues of wind farms up and down the Atlantic coast.

A project to be known as the Atlantic Wind Connection will create a huge "transmission backbone," with undersea cables sited miles off the coast aimed at connecting new wind farms to the power grid without the need for piecemeal infrastructure. The project is run by Trans-Elect, with financial backing for its estimated $5 billion price tag from Google and others.

The Atlantic Wind Connection will run for 350 miles along the coasts of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. A direct-current series of cables, it will be the first undersea cable in the US to actually pick up generated power along the way. And at 15 to 20 miles off the coast, if wind turbines are built around the backbone they will be barely visible from shore.

It has been a banner couple of weeks for the nascent (still) offshore wind industry. A recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory report indicated the massive potential of the wind flying past US shores -- four times that of all the existing electricity generation in the country -- and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar finally signed a 28-year lease allowing the 130 Cape Wind turbines to be built.

And at the signing of that lease, last week, Salazar hinted at this week's transmission announcement.

"By identifying high priority areas offshore for potential wind projects, we can explore the development of a transmission backbone in the Atlantic Ocean to serve those areas," he said. "Rather than develop transmission infrastructure plans on a piecemeal basis, we should – in close coordination with the private sector, states, and tribes – lay out a smart transmission system, up front."

We all tend to think of the Dutch as pretty relaxed and forward-thinking people. But last year they rebelled against a proposed compulsory rollout of smart meters, on grounds that the equipment could reveal too much personal detail to utility company employees and expose citizens to wrong-doing.

Those kinds of concerns may seem exaggerated but in fact they're serious and will have to be squarely addressed, speaker after speaker emphasized at a smart grid technical conference, sponsored by the IEEE Communications society and held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in Gaithersburg, Md. A conference track featured presentations on "false data injection," malicious data attacks, statistical methods of attack detection (and concealment), and "data anonymization."

In the United States, because of 9/11, when we think of smart grid vulnerabilities, we probably think first of terrorist cyber attacks. But there are other things to worry about too. False data injection, for example, is a tactic not only Al Qaeda could employ but also crooked traders, seeking to create fake market conditions that affect price. Instead of creating congestion in order to make money relieving it, as Enron traders boasted they did, a malicious data injector could just create the appearance of congestion and reap millions.

According to press reports, Dutch voters worried that meters relaying information as often as every 15 minutes could tip utility workers off to when houses were empty or expensive new appliances had been bought. Seem paranoid? Well, it just so happens that this summer my family traded houses with a Dutch family living in an affluent suburb of Haarlem, near Amsterdam. Every door to the outside--four in all--and every ground-floor window had three locks that had to be opened with different keys. Evidently the Dutch living in Haarlem--however relaxed and forward looking they may be--don't like to have their belongings stolen. (They seem to worry about that more, in fact, than the yuppies moving these days into New York's Harlem.)

In Germany, because of sensitivities associated with Nazism, the Federal government has repeatedly found it impossible to conduct national censuses. Citizens worry that if the government gets too much personal information, once again some day Gestapo agents may be pounding on the door in the middle of the night. Seem paranoid to you? It doesn't actually matter what you think. What matters is what Germans think--and Siemens, a major player in smart grid technology and a prominent contributor of experts in Gaithersburg, is no doubt acutely aware of that.

So let's be clear: That's significant--and very big in aggregate--but not huge on a per-person basis. If citizens are to be persuaded the smart grid is a good thing and are to be talked into helping make it work to best advantage, they will have to be convinced of its public benefits and assured its downside can be managed. As a source told the Times of London: "The backlash against smart meters could be aggressive if the message that they will reduce energy consumption and help lower carbon emissions is not made clear. The government also has to address these privacy and security issues. Many people do not like the idea of utility companies having a permanent window on their private lives."

MIT basically got it right when projecting future uranium costs, though they didn't also take into account that enrichment costs will go down. The bottom line is that nuclear fuel costs will not move significantly in the next 100 years from where they are today.

Their conclusion, being from a university heavily engaged in research, is that this leaves lots of time to do all kinds of research on all kinds of things. My conclusion is that we don't need to do more research on alternative fuel cycles at this time. What we need to focus on is bringing down the capital costs of standard light water reactors. Historically, however, the government has boxed itself in by funding primarily research on the back end of the fuel cycle--spent fuel processing and nuclear waste disposal--and technologies relying on alternative fuel cycles, including the fast reactor.

Why has the industry had so little success in the thirty years since Three Mile Island in getting reactor costs down?

Nuclear energy is risky and complicated, and so you have to spend a great deal of money to make it safe and efficient. So, contrary to the industry’s expectations that economies of scale would produce savings, costs have gone up, at least in the United States. The cost trend of nuclear plants built in South Korea appears to be an exception at least in recent years.

You wrote the book on the liquid-meter fast breeder reactor. Can’t one make a case that the technology has proved to be a failure, given that every country that’s seriously pursued it has run into serious problems?

Yes, breeder development efforts were the priority energy research programs in the United States, France and Japan. Yet the programs failed in these countries, as well as in the United Kingdom, Germany, and--arguably--Russia, because they never closed the fuel cycle.

You mean Russia never extracted plutonium from breeders to serve as fresh breeder fuel, to realize the dream of “infinite” nuclear fuel supplies?

Correct. Rather than close the fuel cycle, Russia just fueled its breeders with highly enriched uranium. But that makes no sense. Basically, if you’re going to use uranium as fuel, you should build a thermal reactor [like an LWR], because the fission cross section is highest when the neutrons are moving slowly—at thermal energies. If you’re going to burn plutonium then you want a fast reactor because the plutonium fission cross section is higher when the neutrons are moving fastest. By the way, let’s not forget the nuclear navies of the United States and the Soviet Union. Admiral Rickover built a prototype breeder for his second nuclear submarine, but decided it wasn’t a good idea even before sea trials began. In 1956 or ‘57 he concluded breeders were expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time consuming to repair. That pretty well sums up the subsequent history of liquid metal fast reactor development efforts. The Soviet effort to deploy lead-bismuth cooled fast reactors in alfa-class submarines was also short-lived.

Given that sorry history, is there any real basis for projecting breeder costs 25, 50 or 100 years from now?

I don’t think so. When people engage in R&D, and it becomes clear that the direction they’re taking isn't working and that it’s time to strike a new course, they often are the last ones to get the message. They always think, “If we just do a little more research, the next time it will work.”

West Virginia isn't exactly known as the greenest state in the country, acting as ground zero for the fight over coal and mountaintop removal mining. A recent study shows, though, that the state sits atop a surprisingly bountiful renewable energy resource: heat.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory found a potential geothermal energy resource in West Virginia of 18,890 megawatts, up substantially from previous estimates (that number assumes a two percent thermal recovery rate). There is enough heat underground to scale up to commercial-level plants, most likely. In fact, the researchers wrote that "The temperatures are high enough to make this the most attractive area for geothermal energy development in the eastern 1/3 of the country."

Concentrated mainly in the eastern part of West Virginia, the hot spots rise to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit at depths of 15,000 feet. The discovery that commercial-scale geothermal plants could work in this area of the country comes as some surprise, as the technology more often depends on more tectonically active regions - like, say, Iceland (pictured) - to generate the necessary heat.

The US does already lead the way internationally in geothermal installations, with more than 3,000 MW [PDF] installed capacity. The vast bulk of that, though, is located in California and Nevada, with only a couple of plants anywhere near the eastern seaboard. If West Virginia's newfound resource proves commercially viable, it could bring yet another renewable technology to the table.

The study's authors agree on its potential importance: "The presence of a large, baseload, carbon neutral, and sustainable energy resource in West Virginia could make an important contribution to enhancing the U.S. energy security and for decreasing CO2emissions."

Heckled and booed off the stage at a series of public meetings earlier this month, Quebec's salesman-in-chief for a novel energy development withdrew from the fight this week -- citing the advice of worried doctors but vowing to rejoin the fight. The inspiration for André Caillé's intemperate welcome was not a coal-fired power plant or a pipeline full of heavy oil from Alberta's tarsands, but what until recently was considered the green fossil fuel: methane.

Natural gas -- that clean-burning stuff that delivers megajoules of energy with one-half the carbon content of coal, and which even Californians seem to accept as a transition fuel for a carbon-constrained world. Problem is that Quebec has low-carbon hydropower in abundance, and it's expanding into wind power, so fossil fuel development of any kind feels like a step in the wrong direction. Plus, in the Northeast, natural gas is increasingly lumped in with coal and petroleum as yet another environmental miscreant.

Methane's image has slid with the development of shale gas -- gaz de schiste to the Quebecois -- whereby methane is driven from the rock or schiste with aggressive chemical treatments and high-pressure water blasts. Quebec farmers and environmentalists told M. Caillé that, “We don’t want your gaz de shit!” because they fear that such 'fracking' will bring the groundwater contamination that's fueled controversy in Pennsylvania and inspired shale gas controls in New York.

Methane's image problems could shift westward too, and not only because shale gas development is being applied there too. Western producers of conventional gas deposits are working their way into bottom-of-the-barrel gas deposits that contain large amounts of CO2. A few years ago I interviewed Bill Townsend, CEO for Salt Lake City-based carbon capture project developer Blue Source, who predicted that Americans were due to be "stunned" by the "massive reserves" of high-CO2 natural gas coming onstream.

Townsend saw the relatively easy-to-capture CO2 from gas treatment as low-hanging fruit for carbon sequestration in the West. But he said the problem would be too big for sequestration, leaving plenty of rotting fruit unpicked and thus emissions uncontrolled. "It is going to be a huge problem," Townsend told me.

Yesterday, the head of the U.S. Interior Department authorized two large solar energy projects to serve California--one almost gigawatt scale. The projects are representative of a larger set that have divided environmental communities in the West, and the government's decision comes against a highly charged political backdrop in California, featuring two high-profile political races and a referendum challenge to the state's very ambitious greenhouse-gas-reduction law.

The projects also highlight a dirty little secret about much of what goes under the name of green energy: the renewable low-carbon technologies--solar especially--are typically much more land-hungry than conventional fossil or nuclear energy, and that in turn can imply a wide range of environmental concerns.

The larger of the two projects, slated for the Imperial Valley, is a 709 MW concentrator plant to be built by Tessera Solar. 28,630 reflectors covering 6,360 acres focus energy to power an engine generator. Its operation will require construction of a dedicated transmission line; together, the plant and line are considered threats to animals like the desert tortoise and bighorn sheep, besides being--arguably--big and unsightly.

The considerably smaller 45 MW Lucerne Valley plant, to be built by Chevron Energy, involves similar issues but on a smaller scale, obviously.

So Dudley and Hayward are trading places, in a manner of speaking. The basis of this startling switch, according to the Times, is that Hayward managed to mend fences with the Russians after Dudley's ouster, laying the foundation for future joint work. Now that BP desperately needs to sell assets and develop new projects to cover its huge Gulf oil spill liabilities, the Putin-Medvedev government is offering a helping hand.

When the spill occurred, the Russians resisted the temptation to "kick a man when he's down," as a source put it to the Times, and now are hoping to reap their rewards in terms of bargain acquisitions, technology transfer, and assistance breaking into foreign markets. Particularly valuable to them, reportedly, was a commitment they obtained from Hayward: Under a 2007 memo of understanding negotiated with Hayward, "BP offered to help Gazprom make an acquisition outside of Russia. It was no small undertaking, as at the time Western governments were hesitant to see the already powerful Russian energy giant go global. In exchange for this politically delicate task, BP would get help from Gazprom with its vitally important business inside Russia."

As chronicled in this space, several British reviews and several more in the United States have largely cleared the institutions and individuals implicated in the East Anglia hacked e-mail imbroglio. It's becoming clear, however, that the reviews have not put to rest concerns about the process of climate science and climate policy formulation.

Writing this week in the Financial Times, a newspaper by the way that has consistently advocated strong global action to address global warming, former British Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull says that complaints about climate science cannot just be "brushed aside as the rough and tumble of academic discourse." Turnbull points out that the UK has made a commitment, enshrined in legislation, that implies each unit of national product must be produced emitting one-twentieth as much carbon dioxide in 2050 as today. That's not chopped liver, as we say in New York. The commitment rests, Turnbull continues, on a string of scientific claims that are open to challenge at every link.

It appears that I have more faith in the major claims scientists make about our climatic history and future, and maybe because that's because I've never attached any special imortance to Michael Mann's hockey stick graph or Phil Jones's averaging of current global temperatures. But that's neither here nor there. Turnbull is not the only one expressing concerns about the incestuousness of climate science and calling for reform.

Another is Clive Crook, also an occasional columnist for the Financial Times, cited by Turnbull in this week's column. Earlier in the summer Crook wrote a long column for The Atlantic magazine, in which he denounced what he called "an ethos of group think" in the climate science community. Taking care to first point out that he takes global warming seriously and thinks it calls for action, Crook gave example after example of conspicuous flaws in the various reviews: cases where committees dismissed allegations of misconduct without truly investigating them, said peer review procedures had worked because after all they involved peers, and upheld the reputations of individuals because we all know they're so reputable.

What is to be done? Turnbull calls on the British government to require full implementation of recommendations made last month to reform the IPCC. The evaluation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, arguably a much more serious one that the other reviews that Crook subjected to such withering criticism, was produced by a larger blue ribbon panel under the leadership of former Princeton University President Harold T. Shapiro (photo). It called for rotation of IPCC committee leaders, the establishment of an executive director, and a more rigorous and common-sensical approach to fact checking, among other things.

POSTSCRIPT (10/4)

In a letter to the FT responding to Turnbull (above), Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College, London, seconds the call for IPCC reform and makes additional suggestion. They strike me as cogent and constructive. Buckle proposes that IPCC should divide its regular assessments into two parts rather than three. Specifically, instead reporting on science, impacts, and mitigation, it should report on science and policy. Further, suggests Buckle, it should decouple the two assessments in time, so that conclusions from the one can be fully assimilated into the other (science into policy, policy into science), and so as to spread out the work.

By shrinking the thickness of solar cells down toward the nano-scale, researchers at Stanford University think that energy outputs could grow by huge amounts. Such changes might eventually make solar power far more competitive with cheaper fossil fuel-based energy sources.

The concept of light-trapping has been played with for decades as a way of keeping a photon within the confines of a solar cell for longer periods of time, but there has always been upper limits of what energy the technique can wring from incoming light. By reducing the thickness of the cell to far less than the actual wavelength of light, though, appears to have a dramatic effect.

According to a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the ultrathin-film cells could improve on the macro-scale limits by as much as 12-fold.

"The amount of benefit of nanoscale confinement we have shown here really is surprising," said Zongfu Yu, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, in a press release. "Overcoming the conventional limit opens a new door to designing highly efficient solar cells."

Yu and colleagues sandwiched the solar film between layers that act to keep light trapped for longer periods of time, increasing the chances that a photon will be absorbed. The technology is probably a ways off from commercial deployment, but it joins a growing array of new materials and methods that might soon dramatically increase solar power's potential.